1944: Weapons-grade plutonium, for the very heart of the Fat Man atomic bomb used to obliterate Nagasaki, Japan, is first produced at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south-central Washington state. Twenty-seven years later, in 1971, the Atomic Energy Commission detonates the largest U.S. underground hydrogen device, during testing in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The development of […]

This Day In Tech Goes Analog

Mad Science: Einstein's Fridge, Dewar's Flask, Mach's Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World. The volume is currently on sale at Amazon,
Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.

Nov. 6, 1944 & 1971: A Double Nuke Anniversary

1944: Weapons-grade plutonium, for the very heart of the Fat Man atomic bomb used to obliterate Nagasaki, Japan, is first produced at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south-central Washington state. Twenty-seven years later, in 1971, the Atomic Energy Commission detonates the largest U.S. underground hydrogen device, during testing in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

The development of weapons-grade plutonium was one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the Manhattan Project. Allied planners feared Nazi Germany was on the verge of producing an atomic bomb of its own.

That turned out not to be true, but planners had given top priority to the development of an effective nuclear weapon. Two variants were produced in time to be used against Japan: a uranium bomb, christened Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, and the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, used on Nagasaki.

The early work on developing a plutonium-based bomb was not done at Hanford, but at various sites around the country, including the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. The Hanford plant, located along the Columbia River, was established in 1943, at the height of World War II. The B Reactor became the world’s first full-scale plutonium-production reactor in the world. The plutonium produced there was used in the first-ever atomic bomb test, at Trinity, in July 1945.

Security at Hanford was so tight that less than 1 percent of the workers realized they were engaged in the development of a nuclear weapon.

When the Cold War replaced the hot one in the latter half of the 1940s, Hanford continued expanding until it included nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium-processing complexes. The plant produced the vast majority of the plutonium used in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which eventually reached 60,000 weapons.

One of those weapons was expended in an underground test beneath Amchitka Island in the Aleutian chain on Nov. 6, 1971. The hydrogen bomb was the largest ever detonated by the United States: Even buried at a depth of 6,000 feet, it still registered a shock of magnitude 7. The political fallout, however, was even worse.

The test was no secret, and opposition to it had been building for weeks. Environmentalists and peace groups, along with a majority of U.S. senators, were beseeching President Richard Nixon to call off the test, arguing that the potential environmental damage — including earthquakes and tidal waves — outweighed whatever the military hoped to achieve by detonating the device.

Opposition was not limited to the United States. The Japanese protested, fearing the test could cause a tsunami that might swamp the Japanese mainland. The Canadians, neighbors on the other side of the Pacific, indulged in a wave of anti-Americanism rarely seen north of the border. U.S. consulates were stoned, and several American companies had to shut down their Canadian operations.

The Nixon administration defended the test, codenamed Cannikan, saying it was necessary to ensure a U.S. shield against a potential Chinese nuclear attack. That cut no ice with a number of scientists, however, who argued that technology had already rendered this type of system obsolete.

After a legal challenge was thrown out, the test went ahead as scheduled.

In the end, no earthquakes or tsunamis ensued. Subsequent investigations have turned up little or no nuclear contamination. What was gleaned from the test is known, presumably, only to those who had a stake in its being conducted.

In practical terms, however, the Amchitka bomb only stiffened the opposition, helping to hasten the end of nuclear testing. And maybe that’s the silver lining in the nuclear cloud.

Source: Various

Photo: Nuclear reactors line the riverbank at Hanford, Washington. The historic B Reactor, which created the plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb, is in the distance.